The Homes That Walk With Us

Premananda Mangsatabam
We did not leave our homes—
our homes were torn away from us.
The walls we painted with laughter,
the courtyards where our mothers
dried the last harvest of peace—
all of it now lives only in memory,
soft as dusk,
sharp as broken glass.
We walk with bags that carry
less weight than our hearts.
Children clutching keys
to doors that no longer stand;
fathers hiding storms in their silence;
mothers folding grief
into the corners of their shawls
so the young do not drown in it.
Nights are the hardest—
the wind calls us by names
we haven’t heard since the burning.
It whispers the lanes we ran through,
the rivers we grew beside,
the hills that shaped
our first understanding of belonging.
But we are not only our loss.
We are the hands that rebuild,
the voices that refuse to quiet,
the roots that remember the soil
even when the earth is miles away.
We are families holding on
to the last thread of hope,
believing that someday,
the sun will rise on a land
where no child must sleep
under a borrowed roof.
Our exile is temporary.
Our spirit is not.
And when peace finally returns—
as surely as dawn returns
after the longest night—
we will go home again,
carrying not brokenness,
but the courage
that kept us alive.